The Great Email Burndown of 2008
I’ve been suffering under the weight of an overfilled work inbox for far too long. Although I would do my best to stay on top of things, it has been a challenge to simply keep up, let alone make any headway. Far too often, I run into someone at a conference and they will say “I sent you an email.” I then have to switch in to apology mode and tell them that I’ve been drowning in email (which is the truth).
I decided against email bankruptcy. The situation isn’t that hopeless, and these are all business contacts. It would be rude, unprofessional, and counterproductive to simply throw them out and start over.
Instead, I decided to devote more of my time to working through the backlog and (just as important) to start tracking my progress on a daily basis. Like losing weight (another project for this year) getting caught up with your email is a long process, not something that can be taken care of overnight.
So, on March 31st I recorded the number of messages in my inbox at the start of the day, did my best to get the ending point, below the starting point, and iterated day by day. I had 1,941 things in my inbox at the beginning of the day and 1,873 in the day. This is the net progress, which includes the dozens of emails which show up and are processed during the day. I’ve been making good headway day by day and am now down to 1,334 messages. In about 2 weeks I have chewed through about 31% of my inbox. Here’s my record:
It turns out that tracking my progress (or lack thereof) on a daily basis is key. I used a Google Docs Spreadsheet so that I could get to the same data from the office, my home, or on the road (cloud computing, what a great concept ;-).
Note that processed means that I have done as much as I possibly can to move the message forward. It doesn’t mean that I turned the message into a TODO item or that I moved it into a different folder for some later time which will never come. The message has been handled or it doesn’t count.
After I get my work inbox under control, I will start on my personal inbox. There are 3500 messages and the oldest one is from November of 2005. I may try the Mail Trends tool that I found in Life Hacker.
PS - Don’t email me to congratulate me; that would wreck my statistics!
[...] up. But unlike some, he didn’t declare email bankruptcy. Instead, he’s worked out a systematic plan for getting out of [...]
Pingback by Web Worker Daily » Archive Avoiding Email Bankruptcy « — 4/17/2008 @ 7:00 am
Good post, good progress. This is a bit nerdy, but I’ll share a method that works great for me (works best in Outlook — I now have a modified version for gmail, which doesn’t allow everything described below, but makes up for it with that off-the-chain search functionality).
Set the ‘Make Table Editable’ option in your Inbox. (This preference is buried somewhere).
Add two columns to the Inbox layout or ‘Table’ — one for Priority (e.g. 0-Urgent/Now, 1-Today, 2-This Week, 3-Two Weeks) and one for ‘AREA’ — I call mine ‘KRA’ for Key Result Area. You should only have about 3 top strategic priorities at any time, so this is easier than you think
Go through new email daily. When something is not in a KRA, either delete it or send it to a personal email address and delete it. This will get rid of 70% of email. Prioritize everything else. Work on the 0s and 1s in order of priority (and not to the exclusion of 0s and 1s that are not email/inbox related)
This system works. You will only work on things that matter, and you will know what matters.
Within a month your inbox will have no more than 25 emails in it. You will feel in control. (Or not — but this worked for me).
My 2 pesos.
Comment by Henry Albrecht — 4/17/2008 @ 9:05 am
Hi Jeff,
Email is a problem for a lot of people - individuals and businesses alike. I was actually on your site looking for an alternate email address for you when I saw this post. I emailed you the other day regarding a really cool SaaS we’re launching to help small businesses solve email problems and I was wondering why you hadn’t responded. Now I know ; )
I think you’ll be interested in this SaaS - it’s called Email Center Pro and it’s powered by AWS.
This post describes the SaaS and how we’re using AWS to power it.
http://www.deadsimplesoftware.com/index.php/email-center-pro/email-center-pro-uses-amazon-web-services/
You can read more about the SaaS here. http://www.emailcenterpro.com
Hopefully you haven’t stopped paying attention to your blog comments ; )
Cale Bruckner Vice President, Product Development Email Center Pro Team
Comment by Cale Bruckner — 4/17/2008 @ 2:24 pm
I had a big queue (not email, but LinkedIn group approvals) and recruited help to work through it. Within a few days someone else (using my basic rules) was able to do something which would have taken me months to go through.
Ever consider Mechanical Turk, for instance? Set some turkers loose on the inbox.
Comment by Edward Vielmetti — 4/17/2008 @ 9:08 pm
[...] two months ago I decided to attack the unprocessed messages in my inbox in a serious way, tracking the number of messages at the beginning and end of each day [...]
Pingback by Jeff Barr’s Blog — 5/23/2008 @ 7:03 pm